Author: netro

I had conversation with @mattwilliams about weather and how it would be great to have some tools that will tell you if it will be warmer / colder than yesterday. So you can decide what to wear or what to bring (like umbrella) with you to work. So I build it and you can try it here. Let me know what do you think.

From developer point of view:

Whole thing is build in latest rails. I’m using Google API (that have no documentation) for weather feed, Twitter for messaging and for authentication. The whole thing is hosted on Heroku.

The woman seemed to be making some pretty good points, until she stopped with, “Ugh! Those (people she disagrees with) are just so stupid!!”

She could have said Southerners, Northerners, Republicans, Democrats, Indians, or Americans. It doesn’t matter. She had just proven that she wasn’t being smart.

There are no smart people or stupid people, just people being smart or being stupid.

(And things are often not as they seem, so people who seem to be doing something smart or stupid, may not be. There’s always more information, more context, and more to the story.)

Being smart means thinking things through – trying to find the real answer, not the first answer.

Being stupid means avoiding thinking by jumping to conclusions. Jumping to a conclusion is like quitting a game : you lose by default.

That’s why saying “I don’t know” is usually smart, because it’s refusing to jump to a conclusion.

So when someone says “They are so stupid!” – it means they’ve stopped thinking. They say it to feel finished with that subject, because there’s nothing they can do about that. It’s appealing and satisfying to jump to that conclusion.

So if you decide someone is stupid, it means you’re not thinking, which is not being smart.

Davis was a man of few words. When he did speak, his words often had a similar effect to a hand grenade being lobbed into the room. In 1987, he was invited to a White House dinner by Ronald Reagan. Few of the guests appeared to know who he was. During dinner, Nancy Reagan turned to him and asked what he’d done with his life to merit an invitation. Straight-faced, Davis replied: “Well, I’ve changed the course of music five or six times. What have you done except fuck the president?”

I don’t think winners beat the competition because they work harder. And it’s not even clear that they win because they have more creativity. The secret, I think, is in understanding what matters.

It’s not obvious, and it changes. It changes by culture, by buyer, by product and even by the day of the week. But those that manage to capture the imagination, make sales and grow are doing it by perfecting the things that matter and ignoring the rest.

Both parts are difficult, particularly when you are surrounded by people who insist on fretting about and working on the stuff that makes no difference at all.

I reinstalled my Mac recently. Because it was a new installation a had to install everything from scratch which includes a TextMate. After a while of using it I get annoyed by dialog window for opening a file. It list lots of similar files from vendor folder in my Rails env. So I investigate little bit and find that you can modified settings for that (Preferences -> Advanced -> Folder references -> Folder pattern). When I’m trying to open a file, TextMate is ignoring vendor folder, now. You can see regexp for that bellow.